Writing

Bob Costas on Writing

preterite Writing

I just got a big shock: turned on the tube, and there’s Bob Costas in a broadcast TV commercial, declaring that “Writing is everybody’s business.” I know who’s behind this spot, and I’m glad to see some familiar names — but I’m not sure what’s going on with the intersection with the College Board (“education, business, and policy-making communities”?), and while one part of me is happy that some of our scholars are reclaiming the national public discourse on writing, another part of me asks: who’s bankrolling you, Bob Costas, and what are they after?

I’m sorry if I’m behind the curve on this: does anybody else have more info? Is this John’s hoped-for re-branding, a turf grab serving conservative (pardon my amazement at a White House press release that first shifts the blame for educational failures onto the “self-doubt” of the “uneducated” and then immediately makes multiple obvious surface-level correctness errors) and commercial standardized-testing interests, both, neither?

The Personal

preterite Composition Theory, Culture, Writing

So this idea’s got hold of me and I can’t leave it alone, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it’s unsettling my notions of where I thought the final chapters of my dissertation would go. And I think this is what I’m going to have to propose for CCCC because I can’t put it down, can’t let it go unexamined, and so I’ve been following trails of sources at the library and on the Web the past few days, a little apprehensive at where I see it going.

What got me started was Jenny Edbauer’s thoughts on the general equivalency of student essays written in the critical-pedagogical mode. The assignments required by critical pedagogues have become so common that they now show up — in all their generic characteristics — in the online term paper mills. As I tentatively concluded in my notes on Linh’s CCCC presentation, they’ve become our unmasking-hegemony equivalent of the New Critical close reading, only the object is culture rather than literature. And as Jenny points out, they’re so common that they’re easily exchanged, one for another, to the point where — as Doug Hesse suggested with his examples of the Intelligent Essay Assessor and the Essay Generator — no writing needs to be done, because it’s all been said. This is the end to which critical pedagogues have brought Paulo Freire: writing as the regurgitation of lecture, where the ultimate lesson the student takes from the teacher is this: “Do you now see how you’ve been duped by the dominant culture?” And of course the student will answer, outwardly: “Yes, teacher, I see.” And inwardly: “Yeah, sure. Whatever. Just give me the grade.” Because for all their hand-waving and hair-tearing about hegemony and ideology, many of the aging inheritors of Freire often forget that students are powerfully insightful cultural critics with a deep, thoroughgoing, and instinctive awareness of the performativity of culture, and the lessons that these inheritors of Freire would have them absorb about how meaning is constructed become so much lip-service bullshit, not worth writing about and simpler in its generic received-wisdom nature to download from cheathouse.com. Any individuated use value to the student is ignored in favor of exchange value for the grade.

This — Jenny’s “general equivalency” — is shallow writing in that it offers no room for personal inhabitation. We’ve forgotten Freire’s instruction that the subject must be the student’s own experience, not the facile unmasking of the hegemonic functions of assertions about capital punishment or tax reform. But use value subsists in what the writing means, directly, to the student, and that’s where I see an alternative offered by Peter Elbow’s “believing game” and the pedagogical possibilities of personal writing.

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Gendered Language

preterite Politics, Writing

In my first two posts on CCCC presentations, I tried a tiny experiment: referring to female presenters by their last names and male presenters (well, Doug Hesse) by first name. I did this partly because I noticed some slight, unconscious racism and sexism on the part of some big-shot compositionists here this time, and partly because of an awareness of my own learned sexism: in weblog entries and elsewhere, I’ve seen myself sometimes feeling more comfortable referring to female scholars by their familiar first names, and to male scholars by the more disciplinarily conventional (and therefore authoritative?) last names. And I don’t like the split that sets up: women as friends and allies, men as scholars and authorities. Hence the inversion: Doug Hesse as Doug, Clancy Ratliff as Ratliff. In terms of the writing, it makes Doug Hesse feel more approachable (which I’m sure he is), and it makes Clancy Ratliff feel more authoritative (which I know she is). But especially in the latter case, it also felt extremely uncomfortable writing it, because Clancy’s a good friend, and calling her “Ratliff” in writing felt like a huge distancing move. For me, this serves as yet another reminder that the discriminatory tendencies of academia run also through the blogosphere, but also as a reminder that the language I use here negotiates between the scholarly and the familiar in ways I often don’t know quite how to manage. Anyway: it’s something I’ll continue to monitor (and perhaps experiment with) in my own writing, but it might make an interesting discoursal analysis project too; looking at the archives of academic bloggers male and female and mapping use of familiar versus formal naming patterns against gender.

4Cs Keynote: Who Owns Writing? Part 1

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Writing

I wasn’t able to ask Doug Hesse for his permission to blog his keynote, but John Lovas knows Doug, so I’ll ask John if he might put me in touch with Doug in order to seek that permission. This entry, then, is posted provisionally, and may be taken down. Any errors and misrepresentations are entirely my own; the eloquence and insight and originality is all Doug’s. I know I won’t be able to entirely do it justice, but I’ll do my best to at least capture some of the progression of ideas and imitate what I can of the style. In that sense, this post is entirely a derivative work.

Doug Hesse begins his Thursday morning keynote address in song; a clear, rich voice singing a stanza from the Marian Anderson spiritual:

My lord what a morning
When the stars begin to fall

He sings beautifully. His first question, accompanied by a PowerPoint slide of the cover of The Album of Negro Spirituals: “Did I have a right to sing from that book?” The contradictory state of Writing today, Doug suggests, might well be characterized by Anderson’s strange couplet: the praise of the first line, the “pretty apocalypse” of the last.

As writing, rhetoric and composition is doing well, but it’s also in danger. Hence Doug’s question, Who owns writing? Ownership, Doug points out, comprises both control and responsibility. He isn’t talking so much about the ownership of individual texts, he notes, but rather about owning the material conditions of writing; its circumstances and pedagogies within (and without?) higher education. Who speaks for writing? Certainly, we know many who would control writing, but are they the same ones who would take responsibility for it — and what might be the various inflections and appearances of that responsibility? What should our discipline aspire to own, and how?

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4Cs: Owning Knowledge

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics, Openness, Writing

I gave my presentation this morning, along with Krista Kennedy (as read by John Logie) and Charlie Lowe. Charlie was in his usual relaxed, easygoing talking-through-the-points mode, while John did a fine job of reading Krista’s stylistically compelling sophisticated theoretical essay. I didn’t do quite so well, largely because I was trying to talk a point-by-point presentation for the first time; in the past, I’ve always read my presentations from papers, and I do a fair job of that, I think. But my lack of comfort with the talking-through-the-points format was highly apparent in my voice, in the somewhat rushed delivery, and in my hesitation to deviate from those points. As is the case with students whose papers display a marked increase in correctness errors when they grapple with materials or genres unfamiliar to them, my presentation was marked by my delivery’s evidence of my inexperience with the genre. Which is disappointing; with the preparation I put into this, I would have liked to have done a better job.

If you check out the presentation, you’ll see that it’s highly inductive and paratactic, and those qualities are only accentuated by the cuts I made after rehearsing it and having it come out at around 22 minutes: I tried to get rid of the points that seemed least essential, but that resulted in a highly “gappy” feeling in a number of places. What I was trying to do in the presentation was simply to look at ownership issues as connected to student writing through an economic lens, in the hopes that such a lens might help the audience see how student writing — when considered and practiced as “open source” rather than as scarce and solely owned — can give an increased and more diverse valuation to the labor of everyone (students, teachers, researchers, and the various permutations thereof) in the community of first year writing. An additional difficulty, I think, is that the complexity of the theoretical stuff I was trying to present actually really doesn’t lend itself to the and/and/and qualities of parataxis, and is much more easily understood via the subordinating conjunctions of hypotaxis. Which I knew intellectually, but — since I’d never tried to do a presentation like this before — not practically.

On the good side, these points comprise the core logic of Chapter 5 of my dissertation, so I’ve got my revision work laid out for me. I’ll also say that I think my classroom focus served as a nice complement both to Krista’s flights of Deleuze and Guattari high theory and to Charlie’s explicit working-through of the implications of the Open Source development process for composition, and this seemed to play out in the really excellent Q&A that followed our presentations, where a lot of people offered insightful and provocative comments and questions (including several from Bradley Bleck that I couldn’t answer, which gave me considerable material for future thought) linking Krista’s rhizomes, Charlie’s development process, and my own concerns of valuation. So sometime in the next week or so, I’ll be cleaning up the presentation some; right now, I’m grateful to Charlie, Krista, and John, and to all the folks who joined in the discussion.

Doctor Chadwallah (who was apparently attending incognito, and who Krista explicitly referenced in her presentation) offered no questions, to the regret of many who were present.

4Cs: Weblogs as Social Action

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Writing

I’ve had a much busier conference experience than I did last year, attending a whole lot of presentations and wanting to attend even more. I won’t blog all the ones I go to — sometimes I like to just sit and listen — but I’ll do my best to do justice to the ones I do take notes on. I’ve been trying to ask people for permission to blog their sessions, with — for the most part — success, but I’ll acknowledge when I haven’t been able to ask presenters for permission. As always, it’s great seeing colleagues in the halls and sessions, folks I haven’t seen in a while, and I’m particularly glad to put more faces to names that I’ve known only by their writing.

Anyway: went to the first session of the conference with Lanette Cadle, Daisy Pignetti, and Clancy Ratliff talking about thinking of weblogs as social action. Good stuff, and raised some really interesting questions for me about the different rhetorical and/or pedagogical uses to which weblog writing gets put.

Lanette Cadle began with Jill Walker’s now-canonical definition of the weblog and then described her study focusing on the “personal” weblogs of girls between 15 and 22 at LiveJournal. Sixty-seven percent of the 4.35 million LiveJournalers are female, even though women are historically underrepresented on weblogs. According to Cadle, these women are remediating (to use the term Bolter and Grusin have given a new currency that intersects in problematic ways with how Mike Rose and other scholars use it) the historical genre of the diary: the weblog, Cadle suggests, is the paper diary plus links. The rhetorical activities on these girls’ weblogs include “Daily log[s], vents and raves, links, comments, quizzes, memes, and images,” and in an interesting aside, Cadle distinguished these activities from those of “the information-conveying political weblog.”

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On Scarcity

preterite Asides, Computers, Economics, Writing

For the first time in a long time, my blogroll extends. The limitations imposed by my “twenty” theme were problematic: the theory I’ve been working through for my CCCC presentation suggests that scarcity often serves as a technology of domination. This is, of course, an obvious economic insight, but one that I’d never thought to apply to writing.

CCCC Presentation Work

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory, Economics, Openness, Writing

Some of the basic concerns that I’ll need to demonstrate in my CCCC presentation:

  1. Writing, as information, is a non-rivalrous good: what I get from reading a paper doesn’t take away from what you get from reading a paper.
  2. University pPlagiarism policies in higher education, in order to give students the motivation to write, impose an artificial scarcity upon student writing that helps to firmly anchor it as a commodity with economic exchange value. (This follows from Bruce Horner’s attention to the Marxian difference between the use value of student writing and the exchange value of student writing.)
  3. Writing is produced by economically valuable student labor.
  4. Under the neoclassical economic model, students’ upward class mobility is predicated upon their becoming more productive writers/knowledge-workers. (Note that what neoclassical economists call “increased productivity,” Marxian economists call an increased rate of exploitation.)
  5. Just as there is more than one definition of “class,” there is more than one definition of “class mobility,” although both terms bear unavoidable economic implications.
  6. While some associated with the FLOSS movement offer the dictum “free as in speech, not free as in beer” to help others understand the goals of the movement, it should be noted that both senses of the term “free” — gratis and libre — bear economic implications, particularly when understood in relation to the concept of ownership.

So that’s what I’ve been working through lately — it’s also, in very condensed form, the groundwork for my dissertation’s Chapter 5. Which of those, to you, seem to demand the most proof; what have I left out — and what implications are you seeing that I’m missing?

What Do Weblogs Do?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

I’ve been meaning to respond to Clancy’s post on assessing student weblogs for a while, but in and around reading Wayne Booth and not having fully sorted out my own thoughts on student weblogging, it took me a while to get around to it. I was going to post this as a comment at her place, but it looks like there are some technical difficulties going on over there as I write this, so here goes.

Clancy notes that my post a while back on the Ask MetaFilter thread on life-changing experiences got her thinking about how writing teachers who ask students to maintain weblogs evaluate what their students write. Her considerations of the nature of assessment when applied to weblog writing, while not a response to me :-), offer a lot to think about. Clancy seems to me to make two major points: first, what she thinks the weblog should do, “which is primarily to enhance community in the classroom, but then they invariably end up learning a lot about audience and rhetorical practices by engaging in the conversation, too.” Second, how she evaluates that writing — and it sounds to me like she’s arguing that her grading policy (essentially, just participate) places primary importance on the community-enhancement function, and the latter part — what students learn about rhetoric by engaging in that participation — will come naturally out of the first and needs or bears no evaluation of its own. (Is that fair, Clancy?)

In my own pedagogy, I’m still a little uncertain about what it is that weblogs teach students in the classroom.

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The Athlete’s Labor

preterite Education, Writing

I watched last night’s Orange Bowl rout, and I have to say, while it was hardly a suspenseful game, it was oddly enjoyable, in a head-shaking kind of way. I mean, my jaw dropped when Bradley tried to pick up that punt and go with it, and then when he got stripped, I just started laughing. And even without mistakes like that, Oklahoma was outplayed every step of the way. I’ll admit, as an aside, that while I certainly wasn’t rooting for U.S.C. (after Sam Walton’s grand-daughter graduated from there by buying every paper she turned in, the epithet “University of Spoiled Children” kinda stuck in my mind), I was definitely rooting against the Sooners, and I guess I got what I was hoping for.

But that isn’t really what I was wanting to talk about. UMass is Division 1AA for football, and in the midst of our recent budget cuts, there was some talk from the athletic program about spending a ridiculous sum to go Division 1A, with one of the rationales offered being that it would bring more money into the school. And, certainly, as Derek Bok and Murray Sperber point out, college athletics is a big, big busines: I’m sure the U.S.C. Trojans and the Oklahoma Sooners brought millions of dollars to their respective universities by going to the Orange Bowl.

So, with my recent focus on looking at student labor within the university as economic labor, how should we think about the labor of U.S.C. quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart? What sort of transaction does his labor constitute?

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